


Yo Hablo Español

by tokillthatmockingbird



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, baby!stiles and baby!scott make an appearance, because who doesn't love the idea of the mccalls speaking spanish, so does stiles' real name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-05
Updated: 2014-02-05
Packaged: 2018-01-11 07:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1170580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tokillthatmockingbird/pseuds/tokillthatmockingbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The other boy looked at Scott as if he had grown a second head. “It’s not a secret language! It’s my name.” But the reality of Scott’s question suddenly oiled the cogs in Stiles’ brain. He leaned in, miming Scott’s stealth. “Do <em>you</em> know a secret language?”</p>
<p>Scott nodded proudly, puffing out his chest like an athlete displaying a medal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yo Hablo Español

They used to speak Spanish.

Their summers were blanket forts and open windows, muggy heat and cricket noises. With flashlights and bags of Goldfish crackers, Melissa and Scott would whisper in their own secret language, one that millions of others knew but to them it felt special and personal. Scott loved bedtime because it meant private conversations like Daddy’s confidential files but stored in their memories instead of manila envelopes. It meant _mijos_ and _mi amor_ and rolling their tongues with giggles bubbling on their lips.

Melissa would curl her fingers around her nightly tea, clear her throat, and point. “ _Té_.”

Scott would parrot. “¡ _Té_!”

They would spend the night categorizing the things in Scott’s room. _Cama. Libro. Ventana_. Bed. Book. Window. Scott giggled at the sound of his mother’s rolling r’s, and the night he was able to do it too, they shared an ice cream sundae, una copa helado, in celebration.

  
  
  


In school, Scott was confused. For a long time, Beacon Hills was a Crayola box of white colored pencils, one shade slightly different than the other, but nothing like his own. When the kids started drawing self-portraits, he would be the first one done because he never had to wait for the peach crayon.

Stiles Stilinski colored his skin _anaranjado_. That’s how Scott knew they’d be good friends.

“My name’s Goscislaw Stilinski!” he said with a grin, holding out the blue crayon that Scott asked for.

Scott’s eyes widened in disbelief. He leaned in, looking cautiously over his shoulders before hurriedly whispering, “You know a secret language too?!”

The other boy looked at Scott as if he had grown a second head. “It’s not a secret language! It’s my _name_.” But the reality of Scott’s question suddenly oiled the cogs in Stiles’ brain. He leaned in, miming Scott’s stealth. “Do _you_ know a secret language?”

Scott nodded proudly, puffing out his chest like an athlete displaying a medal.

“That’s so cool!”

“Yup!” Scott hated to brag— his mom said it wasn’t polite, and he always tried to be— so he quickly changed the subject. “Hey, how do you say your name again?”

“It’s Go—” Stiles stopped. “You wanna just call me Stilinski? It’s my last name, and all of the police officers at the station call my dad that.”

“Stilezinky,” Scott tried.

“Stilinski.”

“Stilleenski.”

“ _Stuh_ - _lin_ - _ski_.”

“How about I call you Stiles?” Scott asked sheepishly, embarrassed by the way his tongue kept twisting at the wrong times. Stiles mused on the nickname for a moment, rolling it around his mouth like a marble. His brown eyes went bright and large.

“Yeah! Stiles is awesome.”

  
  
  


Scott measured his English carefully, like trying to fill a teaspoon from the kitchen sink. He tasted the words on his tongue and spit them out at a target, trying to find the perfect ones to say. Spanish was rapid, a deluge of letters all jumbled together, a mouth that ran like the Energizer bunny.

At eight, he had a brain that was too fast for his jaw, and he’d stumble over his words with a flush to his cheeks. At the dinner table, Rafael and Melissa struggled to follow his line of thought, and sometimes he’d choke on the English and cough out Spanish instead, and Rafael would look with serious eyes and say, “Scott. _Inglés_. English.”  And Scott would backtrack wildly and try to figure out what he said wrong, but it wasn’t _wrong_ , was it? It was just not English.

“It’s okay to use it at the table,” Rafael warned him, “but when you’re at school, or when you’re working, no one is going to understand you. You have to speak English if you want to be heard.” Scott thought that was awfully unfair, but those were _las normas_ , his father explained, and Scott was certainly a rule-follower.

  
  
  


When Scott was twelve, they stopped building blanket forts because Melissa was too tired, and Scott’s legs were getting too long. They’d lay on top of the sheets and stare up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling that he had absolutely _needed_ at age seven. Their words were a jumble of English and Spanish, a struggle to comply with the crushing weight of their worlds.

These worlds existed on the same plane. They had the same backdrop and the same people, but only in some scenarios could they speak Spanish, and Scott still struggled picking out which times they were. He had to train his tongue to let go of his _adiose_ s and _hola_ s and _te amo_ s, because his mother wouldn’t always be the one to catch the words on the other end.

She stopped drinking tea and started drinking coffee instead.

One night, Scott knit his brow and pointed at her mug. “What’s that?” he asked, and although his ambiguous question was clear to Melissa, she answered, “Coffee.”

“No, Mom,” Scott said with a laugh. “ _En español_. What is it?”

She sighed and rubbed a hand through his hair. Rising to her feet, she said, “It’s just coffee, Scott,” and disappeared.

  
  
  


When he was sixteen, he and Allison spent an afternoon in the park, her hand tucked in the back pocket of his pants. The day was bright, and the air was crisp with the beginning of fall, and it had been four years since Scott McCall had spoken Spanish.

In a desperate attempt to fill the mold his father created for him, Scott had loosened his hold on his secret _lingua_ , and let it float dormant in his memory. Even since his father left, he and his mother curved to their old routine as closely as possible to keep some normalcy in their ever-changing lives. They hadn’t thought for a moment about their nights in the blanket fort with the _té_ and the Goldfish crackers when their lives were swarmed with divorce papers and moving vans and utter upheaval.

An old lady came charging at the young couple, bright fear in her eyes. “¡ _Socorro, socorro_!” she demanded. “¡ _Ayudame, por favor_!”  

Allison and Scott exchanged bewildered looks, and Allison muttered, “Scott, I only speak French. We gotta find someone who knows Spanish!” She turned to the desperate woman and said in the voice that one normally adopts when trying to communicate with a language barrier— loud and slow. Not purposefully disrespectful, just unsure how to move forward. “We need to find someone who speaks Spanish for you!” she said. “Stay right here!”

“No, no, wait, I… I speak Spanish,” Scott told Allison, releasing his grip on her hand as she tried to tug him about the park.

Allison looked bewildered. “You _do_?”

Scott cleared his throat and screwed up his eyes in intense conversation. When he spoke, it was slow, muscle memory working to pull the words from the back of his mind. “ _¿Qué está el problema, Señora_?”

The woman rattled, rapid and scared, pointing back over at the lake and at her self. Scott concentrated, and Allison wiggled in anticipation, biting her lip, unsure of his ability to recall whatever rudimentary Spanish she believed he knew.

Suddenly, Scott’s eyes went bright, and he turned to Allison with a toothy _sonrisa_ on his face. The grin was inappropriate, given the circumstances, but Scott felt free as he said it, a weight lifted from his chest that had mingled so closely with all of his other problems, he hadn’t known it existed until it was gone. “A dog chased her cat up a tree. She needs us to help shoo the dog away, and climb up and get the cat.” He turned back to the woman. “ _Podemos ayudarse, Señora. No se preocupe_.”

The words exploded back in him in bright bursts of color, of vivid, happy memories. Scott distracted the _perro_ — with a low, guttural growl that sent it running with its tail between its legs, and Allison scrambled up the _arból_ to collect the tabby from the branches.

After being profusely thanked, the woman walked away, and Allison looked at Scott with a gleam in her eyes. “That was… how do you say… kinda _hot_?”

“Um,” Scott mumbled with a nervous laugh and an unbreakable smile. Allison closed the gap between them with a few quiet steps. Their lips were almost together when Scott said, “ _Un poco caliente._ ”

“No,” Allison changed her mind, breath warm on his skin. “ _Muy caliente_.” And she kissed him.

  
  
  


“Why don’t we speak Spanish anymore?” He was seventeen when he finally got the nerve to ask. Melissa was meditating overly her nightly _café_ , and when she picked up her head so fast she nearly got whiplash. “I mean… Dad’s not here anymore, so what’s stopping us?” Scott asked with a tentative shrug of his shoulders.

It wasn’t that Rafael didn’t support speaking Spanish in the home. He was just so overbearingly strict about its use that Melissa had lost the will to fight him on it— they fought about so many things, and at the time, it wasn’t worth the energy.

She raised an eyebrow, set aside her steaming drink. “Do you want to speak Spanish?”

Scott was careful in his approach to the answer. He had been programmed to say no. After years of hearing the barking words, “Scott— English!”, his brain latched Spanish with dirty or _descortés_ , and those were two things Scott always tried not to be. But it had been a long time since his father had chastised him, though he and Melissa were still trying to break the chains that he had bound them with. Scott thought this move would be natural enough, a step towards normalcy and a new life since they had settled so neatly, so he said quietly, “ _Creo que sí_.”

Melissa got up with a gentle smile and placed a kiss on his temple. “Fine,” she said. “ _Hablemos español_.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Wow, so I am sorry about the influx of my Melissa/Scott fics, but I just have a deep love of their family. And honestly, I love the idea of bilingual Scott. I saw someone use Goscislaw as Stiles' name somewhere else, and I just loved it, so I put it in here too! Hope you enjoyed!


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